Daily Vocabulary Dose by SSCtube (17-04-2018)

Article

Has Smriti Irani, Union Minister for Textiles and Information and Broadcasting (I&B), become an embarrassment for the government? Her fake news press release is not the first time she’s stumbled on a banana skin. There have been several earlier occasions and each time she’s thrown the skin herself. Let me recount the facts, and then you can decide for yourself.

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However, Ms. Irani’s gaffes go all the way back to 2014, beginning with contradictory claims about her Bachelor’s certificate. Eventually, she was moved from the HRD Ministry. By then she was considered “the most controversial Minister in the NDA government”. It happened when the Press Trust of India released a photograph of some people wearing Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar masks to mark friendship day. It was a harmless picture of an innocuous bit of innocent fun but enough to enrage Irani. “Is this how elected heads will be projected?” she asked PTI on Twitter. “Is this your official stand?”

Clearly, the I&B Minister did not accept a news agency’s right to release a picture it thought the public wanted to see. More significantly, she did not accept politicians could be mocked. Most obvious of all, she felt she could admonish the media without contradicting her government’s commitment to honour free speech.

At the time the Prime Minister did not intervene, and PTI was forced to issue an apology. This may have left Ms. Irani feeling triumphantbut it also proved she doesn’t understand what free speech is all about.

“The bureaucrats in the Ministry have passed several orders which indicate that they have utter contempt for the Prasar Bharati Act. In fact, they behave as if the Act does not exist at all,” Mr. Prakash told The Hindu . “I regard such orders as gross contempt of the Act and of Parliament itself.”

However, the Corporation’s differences and discord with the Ministry have several more causes. In February, the Ministry directed Prasar Bharati to terminate all contractual employees. This was a blatant attempt to undermine its autonomy to hire its own staff. We, therefore, have a clear rift between Prasar Bharati and the Modi government. Mr. Prakash may only talk about “bureaucrats” but they would not act without Ms. Irani’s support.

The recent ‘fake news’ guidelines compounded her folly. The truth is fake news is hard to define and even, at times, to identify. It’s also generated by multiple sources and not just journalists. In these circumstances, Ms. Irani’s ‘cure’ was arguably worse than the disease. The attempt to suspend a journalist’s accreditation before proof of guilt was liable to be misused. To many it suggested an attempt to muzzle the media in this crucial year before the 2019 elections. Finally, the fact that she made her decision known around the same time that Malaysia is proposing high-handed action against fake news — prior to its own election — only added to doubt and suspicion.

Vocab Dose

Gaffes: an unintentional act or remark causing embarrassment to its originator; a blunder. त्रुटियों
Synonyms: blunder, mistake, errorAntonyms: correctionIn my first few months at work I made some real gaffes.